Magazine opportunity: roughcast

What do you love about working on roughcast?

It’s nice to work on a publication with no advertising in it, because it’s so pure; nobody else in the world can influence anything that appears on those pages. We would like advertisers, but how do people even go about getting them? We do a free advert for our mate who does DIY tattoos from a dusty warehouse in north London where he also lives. And we put old ads in there – one for a gay leather bar in the 1980s, one for this weird new technology called ‘a computer’ from 1976, etc. – because, why not? And we have the Prince Andrew Arrest Counter, where we check in on Prince Andrew to see if he’s been arrested. (It currently stands at 0000.)

What past features are you most proud of?

There was a personal essay in the second issue, written by the punk poet Jay Mitra, about how society treated them differently after they went through their gender transition. It was titled, ‘I Liked the Way the World Looked At Me When I Was in the Closet’. That was a good one. In the first one we had an article, by journalist Rhys Thomas, about how he lost all his childhood memories after he banged his head.

We also had a journalism student called Jacob Grattage who interviewed a miner who, in 1984, got battered by the police in a brutal protest at a British Steel Corporation coking plant at Orgreave (Rotherham, South Yorkshire).

Throughout the interview we hear about how while picketing he was viciously assaulted by the police and then arrested accused of crimes he didn’t commit. We published it exactly 40 years after the event. We also tricked Jon Ronson into contributing by telling him it was going in Vice; we did a massive thing, split it into two, gave Vice half of it, and kept the rest for roughcast.

What do you think makes roughcast unique within its category?

We pay our contributors on time, that’s unique in the British media industry, isn’t it? We despise what the British media industry has become; it’s a dull pastiche of what it once was a few decades ago.

Imagine reading a fringe magazine in the 1990s, then take all the ads out – that’s roughcast. We’re stuck in the past. And we are a magazine that exists for the freelancers who create it. We don’t really care about anyone else to be honest. If people want to read it or stock it, fair enough, but we put it on for the contributors.

Also, we don’t put our features on social media. We do make crappy, second-rate social media content which takes about five minutes. You have to do that for brand recognition. But we spend weeks perfecting our magazine content, it’ll never go out unless it’s perfect. And we’ll never put the good stuff on social media.

Also, no artificial intelligence; we will never use it at any stage of the production. This is real content, by real people, about real things. We have a great diversity in our contributors too; our youngest contributor is 19 and our oldest one, the author Michael Smith, is 48.

What kind of customers should retailers be recommending roughcast to?

Anyone who is interested in underground culture and the arts that are non-commercial in nature. Or anyone who wants to support freelance writers, illustrators, artists, and photographers.

Are there any upcoming features in the magazine you’re particularly excited about?

We are currently working on issue 4: the ‘we f*cked up’ edition, which is a reference to the fact that we messed up an entire print run.

What is roughcast doing to support independent stores selling the magazine (eg sales terms, merchandising, social media assets)?

With sales terms, we make no money; every magazine we sell we lose money. So we can’t really offer retailers more than the standard 40% of the cover price. We are up for shouting out the companies on social media, but that’s it really – if people want to stock us, that’s cool. If not, that’s fine too.

What should independent retailers be doing to ensure that they’re making the most of roughcast?

I’d say take all the other magazines away and burn them. Especially The Fence, it’s too damn good for comfort that one. And, yeah, just stock us from now on. Maybe change the name of the shop to ‘we stock roughcast’, go outside and start screaming about our magazine towards oncoming traffic. That should do the trick.